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Sunday, November 30, 2008

A Few Cheap, Quick & Easy Holiday Decorating tips ..

This year, I tossed out some of our old, broken decorations. I then found I didn't have quite as much as I would have liked, although we did decide to scale back on the amount of decorations, too. I don't want to buy more decorations as I don't plan on having the same color scheme in my next house so we had to be creative. Here are a few ideas...not terribly original but what can I say!:-)

First, ornaments always make a great decoration. I bought a bunch of bright and richly colored ornaments everywhere...Target, Wal-Mart, Dollar Tree...even Goodwill. A few are glass ornaments but most are beautiful ornaments that look like the real thing, complete with beautiful designs painted on them. I bought packs of 6 ornaments for $1 & $2. Next, I filled every glass vase, jar and bowl I could find and placed them through the house. It's not overdone, looks pretty and festive and will be easy toclean up. We also tied some to stair-rails, from ceiling fans and a chandelier. On the coffee table was a large bowl of seashells. I like that look so we just added a few ornaments to the bowl.Next, we wrapped a bunch of boxes to use as decorations. Some were empty, some had things in them that wouldn't be used through the Holidays. For the cost of wrapping paper (which has been really inexpensive this year), we made instant decorations. I have a ledge above my wall unit that I usually place a garland. I needed the garland for something else and thought this could be cool. The photos don't do it justice but when my husband thinks it looks "great", we did something right. The fact that he even noticed is amazing:-)Our copper ornaments are coming in handy. We used to hang them from trees in the kitchen but with the layout of our house, we don't have a "kitchen" tree. They look awesome in a bowl with pinecones and cinnamon sticks.Guess that's it for now but we're still working on it.Next up...shopping finds. (Hint...Vera Bradley has desk and stationary sets now...and at Marshalls, they are DIRT cheap!:-)